Course description

What genes cause cancer ? Have we inherited genes from Neanderthals ? How does a single genome code for the diverse function that we see?

We can now begin to answer these fascinating questions in biology because the cost of genome sequencing has fallen faster than Moore's law. The bottleneck in answering these questions has shifted from data generation to powerful statistical models and inference algorithms that can make sense of this data. Statistical machine learning provides an important toolkit in this endeavor. Further, biological datasets offer new challenges to the field of machine learning.

We will learn about probabilistic models, inference and learning in these models, model assessment, and interpreting the inferences to address the biological questions of interest. The course aims to introduce CS/Statistics students to an important set of problems and Bioinformatics/Human Genetics students to a rich set of tools.

Prerequisites

Familiarity with probability, statistics, linear algebra and algorithms is expected. No familiarity with biology is needed.

Contact Info

Instructor: Sriram Sankararaman
Office Hours: Boelter 4531D, Wednesday 11:00 am - noon
Email: sriram at cs dot ucla dot edu

Teaching assistant: Gleb Kichaev
Office hours: CHS 33-355, Monday 2:00pm - 4:00 pm
Email: glebkichaev at gmail dot com

Textbooks

There is no formal textbook. Readings will be posted as needed. The following texts will serve as useful references:

Course format

A tentative syllabus

Acknowledgments

The course website is based on material developed by Ameet Talwalkar and Fei Sha. Some of the administrative content on the course website is adapted from material from Jenn Wortman Vaughan, Rich Korf, and Alexander Sherstov.


Tentative Schedule

Date Topics Reading Problem Sets
09/28 Introduction to genomics Problem Set 0
10/03 Introduction to statistics. Multiple hypothesis testing.
10/05
10/10
10/12
10/17
10/19
10/24
10/26
10/31
11/02
11/07
11/09
11/14
11/16
11/21 No class
11/23 Thanksgiving
11/28
11/30
12/05
12/07